


Being more than a Straw Man or Living in Time as Opposed to Outside it

by shadowkat67



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Episode Related, Episode Review, Meta, Multi, Russell T. Davies Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-08
Updated: 2007-09-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:27:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22380295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Summary: Episode Reviews/Meta on The Human Stain and Family of Blood
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Martha Jones





	Being more than a Straw Man or Living in Time as Opposed to Outside it

_Human Stain_ and _The Family of Blood_.

I wonder if I'd have appreciated the episodes better if I liked the guest starring/supporting characters? I didn't. Found them all without exception grating. Or for that matter the time period and setting..which didn't do a lot for me. OR identified more with the nurse/John Smith/little boy and less with Martha? I'm guessing those who adored these episodes identified with or liked the Nurse/John Smith characters as well as the little boy? While I...well to be kind, I did not care for them and found them to be increasingly annoying? This is a problem I have with the series as a whole - the supporting characters and guest stars more often than not annoy the beejeezus out of me. David Tennant's Doctor Who on the other hand is gradually growing on me and I'm starting to like quite a bit. The actor has done a marvelous job of making the character complex and multi-faceted in a very visible way. His performance in these episodes was quite good.

What I liked? The idea was interesting and I loved the metaphors. The whole army of "straw men" idea - which worked on two levels. Not only were the straw men/scarecrows rather frightening. But they were an apt metaphor for how people are treated in war. How soliders fighting wars can become little more than straw men to both sides. Human life, education, learning, fall by the way side in favor of the battle between two forces to achieve some goal. Also, the far more unnerving tendency that human beings have to see the enemy as little more than straw-men or demons. Not real.

One of the best sequences is in _Family of Blood_ \- where an army of children are firing rifles at straw men. After all the straw men have fallen, John Smith (formerly Doctor Who) goes up to the straw men and discovers they are only made from straw, they aren't human. He announces this to the boys, who cry out in relief - "We didn't kill anyone, they were all just made of straw." This is interspersed with images of World War I as seen by the little boy that stole the Doctor's pocket watch - that holds the essence of Doctor Who inside and all that he knows. And of course the headmaster informing the nurse and John Smith - that he hasn't harmed the boys by preparing them for warfare - that he saw men die in Africa and would go back in a minute to serve again, proudly, it was his finest hour - he misses it still.

That is until a little girl with a balloon shows up admist his speech. Martha, John and the Matron attempt to stop the headmaster from approaching the little girl. But he sees her as harmless, a child, a "girl". And she vaporizes him as if he were nothing more than a straw man. Just as the alien now inhabiting her (a member of the Family of Blood) vaporized the little girl's family. Leaving their house a cold silent shell.

The juxtaposition of these and other images shows how life, the dull daily ordinary somewhat staid life John Smith could have lived with the Nurse, complete with children and family and love and finally death/mortality - is destroyed in favor of immortality and adventure and a ruthless disregard for life. The matron turns to the restored Doctor Who and askes, after he requests she accompany him on his journeys as his companion - "If you hadn't shown up here - if you hadn't picked this place to hide - would anyone have died?" The Doctor can't answer, he just shakes his head. And she tells him, that his human counter-part was far braver than he - for instead of running and hiding, he died to save others. This speech is juxtaposed to two others - the first - the Nurse's speech to John Smith - what is a simple life to one of adventure? Smith's response - I'd rather have this, what is adventure without you, without love, without... Or his response to Martha Jones - " what do you do for him? You're his companion, so he's not lonely? Is that what you want for me - immortal lonliness?"

And of course the best speech and the most chilling, the narrative voice-over by the son of The Family of Blood now inhabiting one of the school boys's bodies - "if we wondered why the Doctor hid instead of attacking us outright, it turns out he was being kind. He chained my father in unbreakable chains for eternity. Mother he threw into an abyss in space - to float for eternity. My sister he placed in a mirror- all mirrors not just one but every mirror ever made, and he occassionally visits her. Whenever you look in a mirror and think you see something lurking there, just out of the corner of your eye? That's my sister. And for me? He put me in stasis, then hung me up and disguised me as a scarecrow - a straw man - to watch over these fields forever. We wanted to live forever, we'd have done anything to live forever - well the Doctor granted us our wish."

It's the time old moral - imortality is not all it is cracked up to be. Doctor Who can live forever, regenerate, go back and forward in time, change time, yet he is doomed to lose all that he loves over and over again. He is doomed to be alone, isolated. Each of the Family - he symbolically causes to share his fate. Chained - trapped in the immortal coil. Floating- drifting through space and time. Stuck out of sight, lurking in mirrors, unknown to humanity or anyone really - nameless. Hung on a stick observing life lived below. Similar themes if you think about it have been dealt with on other shows - most recently Angel The Series.

What is interesting about the Martha/Doctor dynamic and possibly the reason that the Doctor fell in love with someone other than Martha and Martha was placed in a position in which he would not notice her or take her seriously - a lowly servant - is that Martha yearns for the life the Doctor has. She's fallen in love with the mysterious and ruthless adventurer. His ability to do and go wherever. Limitless adventure - a departure from rules, memorization, routine, and procedure. The Nurse in contrast to Martha, prefers the routine, and finds the limitless adventure comes with far too hefty a price. Unlike Martha - the Nurse much like Runaway Bride in the Christmas episode - finds the Doctor frigthening and what he is capable of doing - all the more so. The Doctor himself is tired of it, he yearns for what Martha appears to be fleeing - the routine, the day-to-day human existence complete with family committments, children, and a job teaching boys. He has become tired of the adventure. Their attraction is not so much for each other as it is for each other's lives.

Martha as servant - is both a commentary on the racism and sexism of British society and how it has changed over the years - and a comment on how the Doctor may very well perceive her. As his servant or assistant. He chooses where they are to hide. And he chooses their roles. But he does leave her some advice - to make sure she doesn't let him abandon her, which of course she does at one point. And to make certain - that he gets the watch when it is time. He does not tell her what to do if he falls in love - neither foresees it, perhaps Martha and maybe even the Doctor, believe it will be with Martha - which is of course impossible since it is clear from Smith's behavior that he sees her as little more than a servant or traveling companion. From their embrace at the end - I don't think either has consciously processed that bit yet - when they eventually do - they will have to part ways. For I can't see Martha accepting that. At the moment she's giving him power over her, but that is in character - Martha has given others power over her decisions most of her life - before the Doctor it was her mother. And the two are engaged in a tug of war that will soon come to head. Martha will have to choose and I'm not certain the choice is between the Doctor and her mother so much as it is between the life she planned and one that is unplanned - ie. the reason she joined the Doctor to begin with. Rumor has it the actress and character are joining Torchwood next season - which makes sense, I think that is the next logical step for her. Martha unlike Rose, the Runaway Bride, and the Nurse is not maternal and is not a conscience for the Doctor. She is in some ways almost as ruthless as he is.

They are interesting episodes. And even though I wasn't overly fond of the character of the Nurse, I appreciated the choice of actresses - an older woman who looked well like most of us not like a fashion model. She wasn't young. Pretty. Stylish. Boxum. She was older and somewhat plain looking in both attire and makeup. She looked like a nurse at a boy's school. And her attitude towards both Martha and the world of Doctor Who fit a woman of her time. Martha makes no sense to her and in some ways is as alien as the Doctor.

The little boy did not work for me and while I understand where they were going with him? It's was a bit obvious and a tad cliche. The weakest thread in the two episodes. I felt a bit like I was watching Saving Private Ryan or at least the final scene. Never much of a fan of the quintessential hallmark moment - I'm afraid. At any rate - the montage with the little boy including the old man sitting at the war service for his friend and former nemesis, while holding the pocket watch that the Doctor gave him - as the Doctor and Martha unaged stand looking on - re-emphasizes the life the Doctor lost. The idea of mortality and how fragile and beautiful a life fully lived with a beginning, middle, and ending can be. Juxtaposed of course against the horror of war which makes that life all the more fragile. It's a world that the Doctor and Martha currently stand outside of, looking in, apart. Martha by choice with the ability to always go back to it, and the Doctor from necessity and inability to ever have it.

The reason they ended with the little boy, now an old man in wheel chair looking at a watch - the last image - the watch itself, is the re-emphasis on how time operates and how precious it is. How being at its beck and call makes us human. The ability to live in the moment, not knowing what will happen next and not always clearly remembering what happened before. Seeing life unravel before us slowly, tick tock, as opposed to hop-skipping whereever we dream in our box-like flying machine - is a human traite, a mortal one. And something that the Doctor both craves and fears as well do we. Humans fight to live as long as possible, but at what cost? To our world? Our universe? And why do we want it so badly?

The episode before this one - Lazarus - about the man who turns himself into a life sucking energy monster in order to live forever - a response to the small frightened child inside him who huddled in a cathedrale while bombs poured down around him - discusses the theme in another way. Both that episode and this one center on little boys who yearn to live outside time, just as the Doctor in reality does. But of the two, only the one in The Family of Blood seems to understand the cost and chooses the life inside time, facing a war he is too young to fight with the knowledge that he can save himself and his old nemesis now friend. Knowing via the watch that when one lives inside time, one changes, grows, evolves, as opposed to staying in stasis, floating, drifting, lurking, watching...stagnant outside of it. Because we live inside time, we are more than straw men, we grow, change, evolve as opposed to remaining locked in our bodies unchanging with time flowing like a river underneath.

Watching the episodes did remind me why I wasn't a fan of the series back in the 70s and 80s, when I was a kid - I hated horror, hated the scarey, and anything monsters. The Family of Blood and Human Stain's scare-crows would have sent me scurrying from the room as a child. Now? I find them mildly interesting. Then? Merely scarey, the stuff of nightmares.


End file.
